There are so many funny words in German and sometimes their meanings are straight-forward, sometimes they are words we might wish we had as English speakers!

Here are 7 funny German words, including two funny German words for animals (real or imagined?!), with slow pronunciation and the meanings of the words.

This episode is great for learners at the A1, A2, and B1 levels.

die Vokabeln:

Visiting a German Christmas Market is a true feast for the senses. It may forever change your expectations of the holiday season.

In this episode you'll learn about:

• the main point of the Weihnachtsmarkt

• who to go with

• the various beverages available

• what you can eat there

• what you can shop for there

I might not be able to bring you a Weihnachtsmarkt, but I can bring you an Adventskaffee (an Advent coffee hour) plus a booklet of holiday-themed puzzles for German le…

Wenn man nicht reisen kann, egal ob man zu wenig Geld hat oder es eine Pandemie gibt, kann man immer das Internet benutzen, um eine virtuelle Reise zu machen.

Es kostet nichts und man kann die gleiche Reise immer wieder machen.

Diese Woche gibt es eine Videoreise nach Bayern. Sie können verschiedene Seen sehen, eine Wiese, verschiedene Städte und vieles mehr.

Kommen Sie für 4 Minuten, 30 Sekunden mit nach Bayern. 

When the time isn't right to travel, no matter if it's because money is tight or there…

Juhu! Ausgezeichnet! Ich hab's geschafft!

Seven Years in Business!

In any business there are highs and lows. Sometimes they are close together, like heartbeats, and sometimes they are stretched out over a length of time.

There are no highlights without lowlights and I’ve included them both in this list. In seven years a lot happens in any business, so I’ve selected seven of them for you today.

The Highlights and the Lowlights of the First Seven Years of GermanWithNicole.com

#1 Highlight: Th…

You could be at home, you could be in a park, you could be on your own balcony.

Every place is a good place to learn a bit of German.

Here are three new ways you can learn a bit of German in any of those places.

1. eine Wortsuche

A word search is a good way to engage with German over a bit of time, but it's not so much energy that you can't get started or keep focused.

In fact, that's exactly what one client said about the newest word search activity:

 "The word search was so entertainin…

der Zungenbrecher = tongue twister

Heute können Sie einen Zungenbrecher üben! Hier können Sie das PDF herunterladen:

 PDF herunterladen

Dann schauen Sie das Video. Ich helfe Ihnen dabei, das /ts/ aussprechen zu können und den Zungenbrecher zu lernen. Viel Spaß dabei!

*

auf Englisch:

Today you can practice a tongue twister! You can download the PDF here:

download PDF

And then watch the video. In the video I'll help you correctly pronounce the /ts/ sound and to learn the tongue twister. Ha…

Q: How many Germans does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: One. We are efficient and don't have humor.

*GROAN*

That's simply not true! Have you been to a German wedding where a guest prepares a game for the bride & groom to play? Usually it's something along the lines of "How well do they really know one another?" Or a guest prepares a kind of comedy show with funny skits for the other guests to enjoy. Germans do have humor, it's simply different than what we expect.

If you still don't…

and make German a part of your everyday life.

Sometimes it amazes me how quickly people can pick up German words and sentence structure, even though they've never been to Germany and haven't learned German before.

Clients come to a lesson and they have no idea what German bread tastes like, but they can talk about German breakfast: das Brot, die Marmelade, der Kaffee.

It can be a source of frustration, however, to learn German, but only to have all these North American elements around us:  sp…

Besides books and reading, it's safe to say the board games are an important German cultural element. Games are so important to Germans that there is a Verein (club) that reviews games every year known as the Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year).

German board games are awesome and some of them are now cult games of epic proportions. You might have seen Catan spread out on the coffee table in an episode of The Big Bang Theory. (Das war echt toll zu sehen.)

Here are a few games you could get to …

When you're buying a Christmas gift for someone who is studying German, you may not know exactly what they need. With one small piece of information, that is which level of German they are at, you can do some quality gift buying right here.

Be sneaky! Look on your German learner's book for one of these combinations: A1, A2, B1, B2, or C1. There might be a "+" after it or the book might show a range of levels, for example A2-B1. Sometimes the letter/number combination is on a blue square with th…